“Intolerance,
abuse, calling of names because of differences of opinion about
religion or politics or business, as well as because of differences
of race, color, wealth or degree of culture are treason to the
democratic way of life. Merely legal guarantees of the civil
liberties of free belief, free expression, free assembly are of
little avail if the give and take of ideas, facts, experiences, is
choked by mutual suspicion, by abuse, by fear and hatred.”

How
Democracy Can Survive Artificial Intelligence and the Credo of
Efficiency

Harry
C. Boyte, 2017 John Dewey Society Lecture

San
Antonio, April 27 2017

“Without
some kind of oversight, the golem, not God, might emerge from
machines…it is naïve to believe that government is
competent, let alone in a position to control the development and
deployment of robots, self-generating algorithms, and artificial
intelligence. Business is self-interested and resists regulation. We,
the people, are on our own here…”

Can
we become masters of our fate in an age of smart machines governed by
an efficiency creed, with its conviction that “the system is
the solution”? In this 2017 Dewey lecture I answer
affirmatively the question raised by nine scientists in a Scientific
American essay, “Will Democracy Survive
Big Data and Artificial Intelligence?” 6
I argue that we need a different kind of politics, citizen-centered,
educative, and empowering, as well as places to learn such politics
and put it into practice. Drawing on Dewey, I use schools embedded in
communities as a case study for developing civic power.

Early
in his career as a radiation oncologist, O. Carl Simonton discovered
that a significant factor in cancer patients’ survival was the
conviction “that they exerted some influence over the course of
their disease.” This “mind-body link,” initially
scorned in positivist medicine, has become accepted over time.7
I follow Simonton. Belief in
agency makes a difference in our fate as it does in treating cancer.

My
belief grows from a tradition of politics, democracy, and social
thought which puts citizens at the center, with their ineluctable
inefficiency.8
I experienced this politics first hand in the freedom movement as a
young man. Citizen politics differs from the efficiency logic of
government and markets. John Dewey was an eloquent theorist and
promoter of this democratic tradition. Here I draw from his 1902
speech, “The School as Social Center,” and also other
deep resources including the Catholic and conservative schools of
thought which Dewey opposed; “power and love” and
“developmental politics” from the freedom movement;
community organizing politics; cultural politics; public deliberative
politics; and public work politics. I argue that these counter what
Robert Kanigel calls the “Credo of Rational Efficiency,”
that in my view drives Manichean politics in which hatred is easier
to activate than public love. Public love holds in tension an end
(like winning an election) with values like recognition of the
intrinsic dignity and worth of even one’s enemies. The
Manichean mindset is central to the efficiency culture. The task of
developing citizen politics is challenging but not impossible.

Today,
public life is full of danger signs. “Americans are losing
faith in democracy – and each other,” wrote Nathaniel
Persily and Jon Cohen in the Washington Post.
Their polling showed dramatic erosion of faith in government and
other institutions – the media, organized religion, public
schools, banks, unions and big business. “The problem is even
worse,” they continued. “Americans do not trust each
other. Fully 67 percent say ‘you need to be very careful in
dealing with people.’” Young adults are the most
distrustful of all.9
Apocalyptic warnings abound. “We are entering the age of
strong men,” says the conservative David Brooks, pointing to
Putin, Erdogan, el-Sisi, Xi Jinping, Kim Jong-un, and Donald Trump.
“In America the basic fabric of civic self-government seems to
be eroding following the loss of faith in democratic ideals.”10
On the left, Samuel Freemansees
renewed relevance for Frankfurt School pessimism, holding that
“capitalist consumer culture makes emancipation impossible
because it generates false needs that become strong desires.”11
Pankaj Mishra in Age of Anger sees
a metastasizing rage against modernity. “Existential
resentment…[is] caused by an intense mix of envy and sense of
humiliation and powerlessness…as it lingers and deepens [it]
poisons civil society and undermines political liberty and is
presently making for a global turn to authoritarianism.” 12

To
overcome the dangers we must break the grip of the Manichean mindset
and efficiency’s hold on politics by embedding science,
technology, work, and politics in civic life, face-to-face contexts,
what Sara Evans and I call free spaces where people of diverse
beliefs and interests, working together for purposes far larger than
efficiency, develop agency.13
Efficiency, as Neal Postman puts it, generates the idea that “society
is best served when human beings are placed at the disposal of their
techniques and technology…worth less than their machinery.”14
People and relationships must come first.

Free
spaces, relational contexts with room for self-directed action and
development, are also places for what John Dewey called experimental
inquiry. As Roudy Hildreth explains, such
inquiry is a starting point for democratic values to critique
fictions like the idea that the goal is to do things ever faster and
more efficiently. It begins a process of action, reflection, and
action.15
Here I use Dewey’s 1902 speech “The School as Social
Center,” where he identifies a site for such mingling,
learning, and experimental inquiry as the school
“thoroughly socialized…in contact at all points with the
flow of community life,” different than schools of his time
which he saw as under “control…by the state.”16

In
Dewey’s Dream, Lee
Benson, Ira Harkavy, and John Puckett describe Dewey’s
rationale for such schools:“It
is not the judicial, legislative, and administrative State but rather
the complex schooling system of American society that…must
function as the strategic subsystem of
the society.”17
Benson, Harkavy, and Puckett also criticize Dewey for putting aside
school experiments when he left Chicago for Columbia University in
1904. Dewey’s loss of working relationships with Hull House
weakened his vision. The inspiration of Hull house runs throughout
his Social Centre address.18

To
build a movement for such schools (and other free spaces) we need
politics that revolves around citizens’ interests and
capacities, not politics dictated by the credo of efficiency. In the
following, I sketch the unravelling of civic and public life and the
rise of Manichean politics associated with the efficiency creed,
culminating in smart machines used with the singular goal of making
things faster, cheaper, and more effective to achieve a narrow
objective. Then I make a constructive case for action in three parts.
First I explore resources in Dewey’s work for what Yvonne
Hofstetter, one of the Scientific American
authors, calls “the fight for our
freedom against the rise of intelligent machines.” These
include belief in the vast capacities of every person, social
intelligence, and his critique of detached experts. Second, I begin
to develop the idea of a movement for the school-as-civic-center as
one example of face-to-face relational sites. Such a movement builds
on today’s community schools movement and proposes another
stage through explicit attention to Dewey’s four functions of
schools as social centers: places for interaction; creation of
ethical culture; inquiry about larger context; and addressing
challenges of the changing world of work. Such schools also need a
fifth role, enlarging Dewey’s understanding of citizenship with
citizen-centered politics. Finally, I argue that for the community
schools movement to go to a next stage requires citizen politics
enriched by insights of democratic movements. These include
nonviolence and the politics of the freedom movement, community
organizing, cultural politics, deliberation, and public work. I also
note the appearance of more relational politics in mainstream
elections that point to reawakening democracy as a way of life.

The
politics of efficiency: Mobilizing and the Manichean mindset

“If
our hearts shall turn away so that…we worship the gods of
pleasure and profits and serve them, we shall surely perish out of
the good land.” John Winthrop, 163319

“We
are all involved in this political corruption. None of us can stand
aside; our feet are mired in the same soil, and our lungs breathe the
same air.” Jane Addams, 190220

The
struggle to make technology the subject, not the master, of human
beings and civic values is as old as the nation, as John Kasson has
described in Civilizing the Machine.21
In today’s world the threats to civic and democratic values
from technology also take new forms.

Technological
transformation brings many benefits, from ease of communication
across the world (pooling knowledge, communicating with my relatives
and friends in South Africa), to vast increase in capacities to
diagnose disease, explore the universe, and clean the environment.
The problem, from a political perspective, is that digital technology
is both immensely powerful and simultaneously reductive. It creates a
tool for manipulation on a new scale especially when governed by the
efficiency principle.

“The
datafication of everything…leaves behind whatever can’t
be quantified,” writes Sue Halpern in the New
York Review of Books last December.
“22
For instance, datafication relies on proxies used to represent vastly
more complex realities, with biases of the programmers written in.
Today, algorithms are used to predict who will commit a crime,
influence sentencing, determine hiring, and determine one’s
credit rating. Cathy O’Neil begins Weapons
of Math Destruction with the story of Sarah
Wysocki, an elementary school teacher in Washington. Though she
received excellent reviews from her principal and from parents,
Wysocki got a termination notice because her score in the system for
evaluation of teachers generated by an algorithm outweighed positive
evaluations from humans. The algorithm, developed by Mathematica
Policy Research, may well have used test results of her students
compared to their scores the year before, when others taught them.
It could be wrong on many grounds. Did earlier teachers doctor the
test numbers upward to protect themselves? Did several of her
students have a bad day when they took the test (the small numbers
would radically skew her score)? No one knows; such algorithms are
kept secret. “Verdicts…land like dictates from the
algorithmic gods,” writes O’Neil.23

While
algorithms reduce vast complexities to proxies, the thinning of
social relationships themselves has also been underway for decades.24
Loneliness is especially acute among young people and new
technologies contribute.25
Jennifer L. Cline, “Losing Face: How Facebook Disconnects Us,”
reports results of a series of focus groups and individual interviews
she did with college students which illustrate this dynamic. She
asked young adults if they preferred social media or face-to-face
communications. Almost everyone said they preferred face-to-face
connection, but they also expressed a good deal of anxiety about how
to engage others face to face – and saw social media as the
easy and convenient way out. “These young adults acknowledged
wishing they felt more competent when relating to others
face-to-face,” Cline says. “Unfortunately being ‘out
of practice’ created a vicious cycle in which lack of social
competence led to greater dependence on social media use which led to
even more interpersonal awkwardness.” Extensive social media
use led to curating one’s self-presentation, and in turn to
feelings of greater vulnerability. Such self-curation also feeds “an
increase in internal incongruence because they know that their real
selves, the selves they actually know and experience, are different
from the idealized selves they present.” Looking at others’
posts and comparing the idealized self-presentations to themselves
results in a diminished sense of personhood. These dynamics create an
anonymous on-line culture, in which “users post things…that
they would never say in real life…aggressive comments, rude
insults, and aggressive opinions.”26

In
The Public and Its Problems Dewey
decried the development of impersonal systems, “those ‘great
impersonal concerns’…which now pervasively affect the
thinking, willing, and doing of everybody.” He believed
“opinion has been regimented as well as outward behavior.”27
The digital revolution increases capacities of political powers to
regiment opinion and behavior, undermining “the collective
intelligence” which Dewey saw as the heart of a democratic
society.

Today,
algorithms are able to sort through vast amounts of data collected
through evidence, like bread crumbs in the fairy tale, which internet
users leave behind in the sites they visit, the information they post
on Facebook, the brands they buy, who they talk with, and what they
read and watch. Google alone processes more than 24 petabytes of data
a day, thousands of times the quantity in the US Library of
Congress.28
As the Scientific American authors
put it, “for collective intelligence to work, information
searches and decision-making by individuals must occur independently.
If our judgments and decisions are predetermined by algorithms…this
truly leads to a brainwashing of the people.” Collective
intelligence requires social diversity. “Pluralism and
participation are not… to be seen as concessions to citizens
but as functional prerequisites for thriving societies.” They
observe that “Today, algorithms know pretty well what we do,
what we think, and how we feel – possibly even better than our
friends or family or even ourselves…We are being remotely
controlled ever more successfully.” These dynamics centralize
power and point toward other dangers. “A
centralized system of technocratic behavioral and social control
using a super-intelligent information system would result in a new
form of dictatorship,” they warn. 29
Peter Levine adds “Precisely because the power [of data-driven
behavioral economics] is soft, imperceptible, cheap and ubiquitous,
we don’t resist it.”30

Short
of dictatorship, without necessarily malevolent intent, algorithms
are used by governments to shape behavior. The
Scientific
American authors
cite governmental “nudging,” a concept championed by
policy advisor Cass Sunstein in the Obama administration. “Under
the label of ‘nudging’ and on massive scale, governments
are trying to steer citizens toward healthier or more environmentally
friendly behavior…The new, caring government is not only
interested in what we do but also wants to make sure that we do the
things it considers to be right.” On a much larger scale than
anything yet planned in the US and with more sinister motives, the
Chinese government is planning for every citizen to receive a
“Citizen Score,” monitoring behavior of people on the
internet and the behavior of their social contacts. The Citizen Score
will determine whether people can get loans, jobs, or travel visa.31

Today,
the politics of the internet in the aftermath of Russian
interventions in the US 2016 election has become front page news.
Less known, “kompromat” or a “fog” of
disinformation is spread by new technologies to manufacture public
cynicism and confusion through fake news stories and other methods.
“By eroding the very idea of a shared reality and by spreading
apathy and confusion among a public that learns to distrust leaders
and institution alike,” writes Amanda Taub, “kompromat
undermines a society’s ability to hold the powerful to
account.”32

Such
dangers are exacerbated by expert detachment from civic life, a
dynamic with old roots. Jane Addams in 1902 warned about the
emergence of a class of professionals, or “experts” as
she described them, who saw themselves outside the life of the
people. She said the corrupt ward boss, whom she battled constantly,
was more democratic than the outsider, because at least he
participated in the life of the people.33

Addams’
warnings applied to a group of architects of a new way of seeing the
world that replaced “politics” with efficiency-minded
administration. “We all have to follow the
lead of specialists,” wrote Walter Lippmann, an editor of the
New Republic, the
leading journal of progressive intellectual opinion. In his view, a
growing body of opinion “looks to the infusion of scientific
method, the careful application of administrative technique.”
In the modern world, science became the model for liberal thinking,
and “only those will conquer who can understand.” The
magazine touted the outlook of engineering and the image of the state
as a “machine.”34

Nevertheless
in the US substantial countertrends to the machine model continued
through the 1930s and 1940s in both rural life and urban settings.
Among intellectuals a movement of what Andrew Jewett called
“scientific democrats” looked at science not as value
free techniques but as cultural practices like free inquiry and
cooperative experiment. Scientific democrats gained substantial
footholds in USDA and other federal agencies, described later. On the
ground in local communities, professionals like home economics agents
in cooperative extension were often “citizen professionals”
whose main interest was in helping communities develop capacity for
self-directed public work. They challenged conventional yardsticks of
success. As Isabel Bevier put it, home economics
gave extension work in land-grant colleges “an idealism and a
cultural element…as well as a new measuring stick.
Heretofore, results had been largely in terms of livestock or crops;
hereafter, the measure of successful agriculture was the kind of life
produced.”35
I return to this submerged history later.

Especially
following World War II the machine-image became dominant, merging
with the credo of efficiency which assumes ends as un-interrogated
givens and focuses on making means ever more efficient.36
“The kind of life produced” disappeared as a measuring
stick. Looking back at the 20th
century’s end, Kanigel observes that “it is only modest
overstatement to say that we are all Taylorized…from
assembly-line tasks timed to a fraction of a second to lawyers
recording their time by fractions of an hour, to standardized
MacDonald’s hamburgers, to information operators constrained to
grant only so many seconds per call.”37
Thus, when the Center for Democracy and Citizenship joined with the
National Issues Forums and other groups to organize discussions on
the purposes of higher education, people were surprised at the
question of itself. Dave
Senjem, the Republican minority leader of the Minnesota Senate, said
“‘What’s the purpose of higher education?’,
is a profound question that we’ve never discussed in all my
years in the legislature.”38

The
efficiency creed shaped North Atlantic definitions of democracy and
politics. In 1960, Seymour Martin Lipset defined democracy as a
system of elections with little intellectual dissent in Political
Man.39
Similarly, politics was re-located in the state.40The New Republic articulated
the consensus: “the business of politics has become too complex
to be left to the pretentious misunderstandings of the benevolent
amateur.”41

In fact a few did dissent, like Bernard
Crick in his great 1962 work, In
Defense of Politics. Recalling
earlier understandings and drawing on Hannah Arendt as well as
Aristotle, Crick described politics as “a great and civilizing
activity” that involved engagement of diverse interests to
achieve some public goal. Crick argued that politics is about
plurality, not similarity. He defended politics against a list of
forces including nationalism, technology, mass democracy,
conservative, liberal, and socialist ideologies.42

Yet
state-centered democracy dominated and produced the major strand of
liberalism, “mass politics,” which stresses universal
claims, distributive justice, individual rights, and a consumer view
of the citizen. Thus long before the internet, mass politics was
reductionist, holding citizens to be singularly concerned with
fulfilling needs and wants, not with questions of purpose,
creativity, civic contribution, or meaningful work. In such politics,
the emphasis is on distribution to citizens conceived as customers,
not on agency or citizens as co-creators. 43

I
experienced mass politics from the inside. Though I had life-shaping
experiences with citizen politics in the civil rights movement, I
also participated in a consequential development in mass politics
when Citizens for a
Better Environment in 1974 invented the modern canvass powered by a
formula. The canvass involves paid staff going door to door on an
issue, raising money and collecting signatures. The formula that
makes it work identifies an enemy or “target” and defines
the issue in radically reductionist, good- versus-evil terms in order
to produce a majority of “50% +1.” Over the past four
decades many canvass operations have developed, including
environmental and consumer organizations and the Public Interest
Research Group (PIRG) network on college campuses. For years I
defended the canvass and, implicitly, the formula which makes it
efficient and co-authored, Citizen
Action and the New American Populism, with
Steve Max and Heather Booth, founder of the Midwest Academy training
center which was the hub for spreading the method. I remember well
the urgency we felt in the face of massive mobilization by large
corporate interests to roll back environmental, consumer, affirmative
action, progressive tax and other legislation in the early 1970s. We
saw the canvass as an efficient
way to fight
back on a large scale and in fact it did produce successes on
environmental, consumer and other issues even during the Reagan
presidency. We estimated that the canvass reached 12 million
households a year in the mid-eighties.44

Over
time I also came to see problems. I described these in 2001, in “A
Tale of Two Playgrounds,” a paper for the American Political
Science Association. The efficiency rationale has unintended
consequences. The Manichean formula polarizes civic life, objectifies
and abstracts “the enemy,” erodes citizenship, and
communicates that politics is warfare. Indeed, I founded the youth
civic and political education initiative Public Achievement, with an
organizing team, as an explicit alternative to Manichean politics.45

New
technologies dramatically increase the reach of the Manichean
formula. It is used in robo-calls, internet mobilizations, cable TV
and talk radio, Michael Moore’s documentaries, and Karl Rove’s
“axis of evil” framework after 9-11. It shaped the
election of 2016. A report by Chuck Todd and Carrie Dann, “How
Big Data Broke American Politics,” details the increasingly
polarized campaigns and politics over the last two decades.
“Polarization isn’t new, but it’s definitely worse
than it was 20 years ago,” they write. “And thanks to
technology and the manipulation of demographic data, those charged
with the setting and resetting of American politics…have set
the stage and conditioned the country for a more permanent polarized
atmosphere.”46

Linda
Honold, a major leader in progressive politics, described to me her
disillusionment with the polarizing Manichean formula and its
expression in mobilizing approaches with a “50% + 1”
rationale. Former chair of the Wisconsin Democratic Party, she led
implementation of what is called the Wisconsin Blueprint Project
developed by 125 progressive leaders from labor unions, the League of
Conservation Voters, Planned Parenthood, Wisconsin Citizen Action and
others. Honold, as a young single mother on welfare, had used
programs like CETA, Pell grants, aid for dependent families, and
public universities to get out of poverty. After time in business and
getting a doctorate in organizational theory, she joined the
progressive activist world out of desire to champion such programs.
But her tenure as state chair of the Democratic Party was
frustrating. “It used a 50%+1 approach that didn’t engage
people.” Many groups in the progressive coalition use the good
versus evil formula. Indeed, a handbook called “Heroes
Narrative,” used by progressive groups around the country,
frames every issue as a struggle of heroes versus villains.47
Even groups which don’t use the canvass use a mobilizing
approach, getting people out to rallies, town meetings, press
conferences, and other events. Honold says that while the 50% + 1
formula is entrenched, some leaders are beginning to ask questions.
Her own research has shown how it feeds public anger at government,
which candidates like Scott Walker have tapped with success. In the
conclusion I describe signs of an alternative emerging in mainstream
electoral politics.48

In
this context, the work of John Dewey represents a tradition vital to
recall.

John
Dewey against the technocrats

John
Dewey was not naïve about conflict and power, as Hildreth shows
in his essay, “Reconstructing Dewey on Power,” and Jeanne
Oakes and John Rogers also demonstrate in their 2003 Dewey lecture
and later their book, Learning
Power.49He also sensed novel dynamics
of power in an information society, where power is not simply a
zero-sum scarce good that requires a bitter struggle in which gains
are matched by losses on the other side. Rather, knowledge power is
increased through shared transactions. Dewey believed in what he
called “the social” quality of knowledge production and
dissemination through education. He argued that recognizing
knowledge’s social quality was key to the future of democracy.

A
passion for the relevance of ideas, for intellectual work that
actually makes a difference in the real world, was a constant theme
for Dewey. “The work of history,” he argued, “was
to free the truth—to break down the walls of isolation and of
class interest which hold it in and under.” But truth only
becomes free, he added, when it “distributes itself to all so
that it becomes the Commonwealth.”50
Such a perspective on “truth” and “knowledge”
made Dewey a sharp critic of knowledge “for its own sake”
and experts detached from public life.51

There
was, throughout Dewey’s career, a deep respect for ordinary
people’s values, their activities, and their intelligence.52
Dewey’s democratic faith grew from his conviction that
everyday citizens have what might be called a relational way of
acting and seeing often missing in more educated groups. As he put it
in a tribute to Jane Addams, co-founder of Hull House, her belief in
democracy derived from her “deep feeling that the simple, the
‘humble’ peoples of the earth are those in whom primitive
impulses of friendly affection are the least spoiled, the most
spontaneous.” 53

Dewey
sought to ground intellectual life in the activities and work of
common people. In his view, the entire tradition of philosophy had
made an invidious – and invalid – distinction between
thought and action, intellect and work. “The depreciation of
action, of doing and making, has been cultivated by philosophers,”
Dewey wrote in The Quest for
Certainty, his attack on the
idea that inquiry can be separated from the social context. 54

Dewey’s
basic argument, profoundly democratic in its implications, is that
all knowledge – “academic” no less than “practical”
– is the product of an interplay of experience, testing and
experiment, observation, reflection, and further action. This process
can be summarized as experimental inquiry. All have the capacity to
participate in such inquiry.

Building
on these premises about the social nature of knowledge, “social
intelligence,” and its action orientation, Dewey developed a
dynamic vision of democracy as “a way of life,” not
simply a form of government. John Dewey’s philosophy led him
into fierce debates with the technocratic strands of liberalism.

By
the late 1920s, many social scientists advanced a “democratic
realist” position that ordinary people are in the grip of blind
instincts and need guidance. Thus in 1934, Walter Shepherd, in his
presidential address to the American Political Science Association,
declared that “government demands the best thought, the highest
character, the most unselfish service that is available” and
called for “an aristocracy of intellect and character.”55Walter Lippmann developed a more
sophisticated argument but one that was even more challenging to
Dewey’s belief in democracy as a way of life. Lippmann observed
that most people possessed very limited information. Their vision of
the “real world” was distorted by “artificial
censorship, the limitations of social contact, the comparatively
meager time available in each day for paying attention to public
affairs, the distortion arising because events are compressed into
short messages, the difficulty of making a small vocabulary express a
complicated world, and finally the fear of facing those facts which
threaten the established routine…”56
Lippmann’s solution was to have a “form of expertness
between the private citizen and the vast environment in which he is
entangled.” Citizens’ minimal role was to be measured in
efficiency terms: “To support the Ins when things are going
well; to support the Outs when they seem to be going badly.”
The test of government was whether it delivered the goods.57

Dewey
addressed technocratic critics of active, participatory democracy in
several ways. In response to the pretensions of credentialed
intellectuals and academics, he made action, not detached thought,
the foundational experience of human beings. As his biographer Alan
Ryan put it, the person “makes sense of
the world for the sake of
acting productively on the
world.”58

In
response to social scientists’ arguments that most people are
in the grip of raw instincts, Dewey’s book, Human
Nature and Conduct, proposed
that “habits,” not “instincts,” shape most of
human behavior.59
Dewey argued that habits can be developed through “intelligent
action.” This has proven fertile for educational innovation.
Thus, Deborah Meier, the great democratic educator, founder of the
Central Park East schools in East Harlem and Mission Hill School in
Boston, has demonstrated the fruitfulness of the concept of habits in
her schools for democracy.60

I
believe that his most significant strategy, building on the Hull
House settlement and also the Lab School he founded in Chicago, came
earlier, in the concept of “schools as social centres.”

Voucher
champions like Education Secretary Betsy DeVos argue that they
“empower parents” through school choice, but this means
seeing the market as the best mechanism for allocating resources. As
Deborah Meier observed, "The
notion that we can leave it to the whims of individual parent choice
in marketplace fashion is problematic. Good parents are inclined to
put their own children's immediate interests first.”61
By promoting a voucher system leaders like DeVos or Cory Booker on
the Democratic side turn citizens into customers.62

Most
policy makers on the pro-public school side who tout democratic
values like diversity and inclusion also seek to design efficient
means, like high stakes testing with little interest in lay citizens’
input. Luke Bretherton describes how studies school reform efforts
led by lay citizens reveal the deep expert-knows-best bias in
schools. "What comes across time and again is the hostility
'non-experts' provoke,” he says. Bretherton argues that
increasing public support for schools will require a shift from the
technocratic, top-down mindset to approaches which involve the
diverse citizenry in school change and school life.63

It
is useful to recall that citizen politics was in fact central to the
development of American education. As Lawrence Cremin described in
Transformation of the School,
“the politics of education…exhibited unique tendencies
over the past century,” by bringing together a wide assortment
of people with radically different interests and views. “In
almost every state citizens organized to do battle in the cause of
public schools. The political coalitions they formed frequently drew
together the oddest collections of otherwise disparate interests.”
The movement for schools, with mechanisms for popular power like
local school boards and parent teacher associations, left an
indelible mark of popular ownership and agency. “By the artful
device of lay control the public was entrusted with the continuing
definition of the public philosophy taught its children,”
writes Cremin. “In this political process by which the public
defines the commitments of the schools…one finds the decisive
forces in American educational history.”64

Citizen
politics is stirring again in the “community schools”
movement, across divides of party, race, class, and region. I
realized its possibilities when I was talking with my nephew Luke
Truan. Luke, like many in his Georgia county of Gwinnett (the
congressional district, the 7th,
has been represented by a Republican in Congress since 1994), leans
Republican and conservative. But he doesn’t like labels. “What
makes it difficult for me to identify with one political party is
that politicians on both sides of the aisle switch what they support
very often.” He observes that politicians dispute the existence
of common ground even when it is pointed out in public settings.

His
community and Camp Creek Elementary school, where his son Erik goes
to school, reflect a changing demographic mix. Education also has
“moved to the forefront” of his interests since Erik
started his elementary school career. The school is strongly
connected to the community, with many ways for parents and others to
get involved. The grocery store has a “Camp Creek” night.
Parents come in and out of the school without having to get
permission. Almost half the families were involved in support of a
school play this spring. Luke has become friends with the school
staff as well as the teachers. Luke, long active in IT security work,
is worried about loss of relationships in the high tech world. “I
believe building relationships with people and not technology is one
of the most important activities that we need to do. I would love to
see a national campaign of ‘Get offline and Get connected’
really take off with the younger generation.” He also believes
that Camp Creek’s use of technology is a model. “Their
usage of technology to get the community and parents involved is a
great example of how to use technology to connect people.”65

I
see Luke as part of a growing movement for community schools. For
instance, the Coalition for Community Schools works with hundreds of
schools across the country and dozens of partners. One is Communities
in Schools, a coalition which involves more than 2500 schools in
projects to bring community resources into schools. Partners also
include the National School Board Association and the National Parent
Teachers Association. The Coalition has identified more than 5000
community oriented schools which meet their broad criteria. Community
schools, in their view, “provide expanded learning
opportunities that are motivating and engaging,” not only
during school hours but after school and in summers. They “offer
essential health and social supports and services.” They
“engage families and communities as assets in the lives of
their children and youth.” The Coalition has a commitment to
“college, career, and citizenship,” based on the concept
that “21st
century skills will not only guide [students] through their
post-secondary and professional career, but that they will make them
better…citizens in a democratic society.” Community
schools have formed many partnerships with colleges and universities,
and the University-assisted Community School Network, organized by
the Coalition and the Netter Center for Community Partnerships at the
University of Pennsylvania, includes 70 colleges and universities.
“There is a new energy and growth,” said Ira Harkavy, a
pioneering leader in school-higher education partnerships who founded
the Netter Center and helped to create the Coalition. Since its
official launch in 1997, the Coalition has adopted a “large
tent” approach which invites community schools with a variety
of approaches and types (it includes public, charter, parochial and
private schools), that agree with the core principles of expanded
learning opportunities, parental involvement and a “whole
child” philosophy.66

I
believe that Dewey’s concept of schools as social centers can
help to move the community school movement to another level of
importance in our time of democratic crisis.67

Schools
as social centers.

Education
was central to the democratic way of life in Dewey’s view. In
"Democracy in the Schools," he said democracy "has to
be enacted anew in every generation, in every day and year, in the
living relations of person to person in all social forms and
institutions." For Dewey, education was at the center of
democratic society; democracy was the spirit of education.68
Dewey advanced the idea of schools as social centers to equip
citizens with resources for action in a world that was more and more
impersonal. His four core elements remain relevant today.

Throughout
his 1902 lecture, Dewey drew on the example of Hull House. He saw the
settlement as a space for sustained, face-to-face mingling among
diverse populations in cities like Chicago, and contrasted such space
with the forced and destructive “Americanization” which
he believe was occurring when different races and cultures
encountered each other in impersonal and antagonistic settings. For
example, in factory-like schools where children are instructed with
rote learning and have little chance to interact, young people “are
frequently left floating and unstable between the two [their
immigrant cultures and the dominant culture]. They even learn to
despise the dress, bearing, habits, language and beliefs of their
parents.” In contrast, at Hull House “the new labor
museum…show[s] the younger generation something of the skill
and art and historic meaning of the older generations…Many a
child has awakened to an appreciation of admirable qualities hitherto
unknown.” Thus, for Dewey the first element of schools as
social centers involved creating a “means for bringing people
and their ideas and beliefs together, in such ways as well lesson
friction and instability and introduce deeper sympathy and wider
understanding.”69

In
today’s context where the “relational” is being
replaced with the “informational” such an idea of
educational sites as places for mingling, developing understanding,
and building human relationship has renewed importance. The concept
of the school as such a site can make explicit and intentional the
animating spirit of community schools, as a counter to technocratic
patterns.

Second,
the school as social center provides, in Dewey’s view, an
antidote to the loss of “the old agencies” like family
and religious group, which for all the faults Dewey the modernist saw
in them, served to keep young people “living decent,
respectable, and orderly lives.” Schools embedded in
communities must supply young people with “compensation for the
loss of reverence and the influence of authority.” Dewey
suggested school activities such as “the social club, the
gymnasium, the amateur theatrical presentation, the concert”
and others to generate ethical behavior and values.70

Such
a project of ethical civic repair is more relevant than ever in our
age of eroding relationships and cyberbullying. As I will show, a
citizen politics perspective also goes beyond Dewey’s modernist
bias. He saw schools replacing
family and faith. Schools embedded in community life can strengthen,
not replace, mediating institutions such as families, congregations
and others.

Third,
Dewey observed that “life is getting so specialized, the
divisions of labor are carried so far, that nothing explains or
interprets itself…Hence we must rely upon instruction, upon
interpretation come to us through conscious channels” to gain
some sense of the larger workings of institutions and society as a
whole.71
If the early 20th
century seemed complicated, today’s world represents a quantum
leap in complexity. But here the enormous popular interest in and use
of the internet suggests deep desire to gain understanding of our
modern condition, supplemented by popular history, science, and
geography channels, museums, reading groups and a host of other adult
education experiences. Just as Hull House equipped new immigrants a
hundred years ago with knowledge of the whole, schools embedded in
the life of communities hold potential to be centers for vitally
important adult learning.

Finally,
for Dewey schools as social centers needed to equip people to cope
with a changing world of work. Using examples like lawyers and
doctors who “must go on studying all his [or her] life,”
Dewey argued that “what is true of the lawyer and the doctor…is
true…of all sorts and degrees of people. Social, economic, and
intellectual conditions are changing at a rate undreamed of in past
history. Now, unless the agencies of instruction are kept running
more or less parallel with these changes, a considerable body of
[people] is bound to find itself…left stranded and become a
burden for the community to carry.” 72

In
the age of robots and smart machines, the dangers Dewey saw more than
a century ago are multiplying rapidly. Schools embedded in the life
of communities which consciously attend to the challenges of the
changing world of work can develop learning opportunities to help
keep people up to date with new skills. If they become conscious
sites of civic power and develop alliances with other groups, they
also can push back against today’s economic logic in which
efficiency, doing things ever faster and more cheaply regardless of
the cost in human displacement, is the criterion for innovation.

To
accomplish this purpose and, more generally, to move the community
movement as a whole to a next stage, “social centers”
deeply woven into the fabric of communities and tied to other civic
learning sites, require a fifth role that enlarges Dewey’s
citizenship with an explicit citizen politics. Social learning
centers need to become “civic centers,” where people
learn and practice such politics.

Citizen
politics

“Power
properly understood is…the ability to achieve purpose…to
bring about social, political, and economic change…the
concepts of love have usually been identified with the resignation of
power and power with the denial of love. [But] power without love is
reckless and abusive, and love without power is sentimental and
anemic…It is this collision of immoral power and powerless
morality which constitutes the major crisis of our time.”

The
gap between Dewey’s vision of participatory democracy and the
means to realize it is often noted by biographers. “Dewey never
actually developed, let alone implemented, a comprehensive strategy
capable of realizing his general theory in real world practice,”
write Benson, Harkavy, and Puckett in Dewey’s
Dream.74

Part
of the problem, in my view, was that Dewey translated his conception
of the person as problem-solverinto the
view that the ideal human agent is the citizen scientist. For
instance, this is the emphasis throughout Culture
and Freedom.
He argued “the future of democracy is allied with the spread of
the scientific attitude. It is the sole guarantee against wholesale
misleading by propaganda.”75
The habits Dewey cites as part of the scientific attitude --
willingness to suspend belief, to look at evidence and go where it
leads, to hold ideas as provisional hypotheses, to enjoy new problems
– are important attributes of the democratic citizen. But they
are also cognitive
habits. In
Public Achievement, the civic education youth initiative in which
young people choose issues they want to address and are coached by
older people, we have seen how young people’s development of
civic agency, the capacity to work across differences to address
problems and shape their environments, includes cognitive skills but
also involves community and civic organizing skills. These include
“power mapping,” learning the culture of everyday
environments, one on one interviews and active listening, developing
and sharing public narrative, public speaking, mutual accountability,
and the capacity to act in open environments with many versions of
right and wrong. 76

Most
significantly, Dewey, reflecting the progressive world in which he
worked, made a definitional mistake by removing “politics”
from civic life. Dewey’s definition can be found in “School
as Social Centre.” “I mean by ‘society’ the
less definite and freer play of the forces of the community…that
have nothing to do with politics or government,” Dewey said. He
proposed that citizenship needed to be defined more broadly, “to
mean all the relationships…involved in membership in a
community.” 77

Dewey
was right to define citizenship as grounded in the free play of
community life. But he was wrong to see community life as apolitical.
One consequence was that he defined the political world in
ideological terms and made a faulty distinction between modern and
traditional communities in the political work of creating a
democratic society. During World War I, he sought to get the federal
government to intervene in the politics of the Polish community,
intervening on the side of liberal groups against conservative and
Catholic ones. He championed public schools, and opposed parochial
ones. He became embroiled in a polemic with the Catholic Church. As
Alan Ryan says, “The Catholic church still struck Dewey as a
threat to human intelligence and social reform…The church’s
leaders and rank-and-file Catholic intellectuals returned his
distaste.”78

To
develop the “social intelligence” required to counter the
rising control of smart machines driven by the efficiency principle
we need an understanding of politics much broader
than ideology, capable of overcoming bitter divisions. Dewey
intimates this need in his essay, “Creative Democracy,”
which begins this lecture. But his great insight needs to be
translated into politics. For instance this involves recognizing the
rich and powerful challenge to technocracy by conservatives and
Catholics.

Dating
from writers like Edmund Burke, the English conservative who
championed “little platoons” of communal life against the
modern age, communitarian conservatives have taken intellectual
leadership in the fight against technocracy and the displacement of
human beings by scientific triumphalism. Peter Berger and Richard
Neuhaus, co-directors of the Mediating Structures Project of the
American Enterprise Institute, illuminated the colonizing,
destructive power of government and technocracy on human communities.
As Berger and Neuhaus observed, acting out of bureaucratic
imperatives justified by ideologies of equality, justice, and the
public good, the state tends to expand its power, scope, and
authority at the expense of small-scale “structures of daily
life” such as families, congregations, neighborhoods, and
cultural and voluntary groups. But costs are high: “A growing
trend toward legally enforced symbolic sterility in public space”
that denies the authority of communities; the weakening of family and
small-group bonds and the widening intrusions of experts and
professionals into the most private realms of life.79

Subsequently
intellectuals such as Bill
Schambra, Bob Woodson, Mary Ann Glendon, and Yuval Levin have
developed these themes. Michael Joyce,
president of the Bradley Foundation which Hillary Clinton famously
designated as the “heart of the right wing conspiracy,”
put them into a vivid polemic. “Americans are sick and tired
of being told they’re incompetent to run their own affairs.
They’re sick and tired of being treated as passive clients by
arrogant, paternalistic social scientists, therapists, professionals
and bureaucrats.”80
It is impossible to understand the left-right divide today without
attending to the appeal of such arguments.

Important
strands of Catholic social thought point beyond ideological divides,
to a democratic citizen politics which puts the conservative critique
of technocracy in conversation with other currents of thought. For
instance, in his 1995 New York Times opinion
piece, “The Pope vs. the Culture of Death,” Paul Baumann
called on Catholics to bring their critique of the efficiency gospel
and its embodiment in materialism and technocracy into a larger
democratic movement.81
Pope Francis’ climate encyclical Laudato
Si’ is a brilliant continuation of this
tradition. Laudato Si’ welcomes
scientific and technological discovery while contextualizing these in
a larger cultural context.82

In
addition to insights from Dewey and conservative and Catholic thought
which I have highlighted, I propose
five other elements of citizen politics:

Nonviolent
“developmental politics”: Though
we didn’t use the term, I first learned “citizen
politics”83
in the citizenship schools of the freedom (civil rights) movement
which had a central focus on developing agency.84
Charles Payne, pointing to citizenship schools, freedom schools, and
other experiences which developed capacities for action, identifies
what he calls “developmental politics,” another term for
citizen politics. He locates such politics in the “organizing”
dimensions of the movement, contrasted with “mobilizing”
activities like demonstrations, sit-ins, and freedom rides.85
The difference between mobilizing and organizing is now
well-established in the literature, though in the larger world it is
muddied by the fact that most mobilizing efforts call themselves
“organizing.”86
Such citizen politics is full of tension and conflict. It involves
relationship-building and development of public capacities among
self-organizing citizens to solve public problems and to create and
sustain public goods and civic institutions, the mediating structures
held dear by conservatives.

Citizenship
schools taught nonviolence as a philosophy different than pacifism,
the refusal of violence in any circumstance, and also different than
current theory and practice which define nonviolence as simply
tactical.87
Nonviolence in the movement tradition involves spiritual, moral and
psychological disciplines that refuse to demonize
opponents or see them in reductionist terms.
In Stride toward Freedom, Martin
Luther King develops a profound account of the spiritual and moral
disciplines of such a philosophy, what can be called public love.
Public love involves nonviolence as struggle, not inaction;
understanding opponents,
not seeking to defeat or humiliate them; distinguishing between evil
actions and the persons who commit the actions; and a sense of
personal redemption gained from refusal to hate. “Hate…corrodes
the personality and eats away at its vital unity,” King wrote.
“The nonviolent approach…first does something to the
hearts and souls of those committed to it. It gives them new
self-respect. It calls up resources of strength and courage they did
not know they had.” 88

In
Power and Love, Adam
Kahane describes his work over decades as a designer, facilitator and
organizer of practical social change projects building on the “power
and love” framework.89
His efforts took him from Canada to India, from Guatemala to South
Africa. Some initiatives had striking results, as in the Canadian
initiative on climate change and the birth of the sustainable
agriculture movement. They testify to the power of nonviolent
political strategy and philosophy when carefully developed and
practiced as a framework which brings together groups of widely
varying views, backgrounds, and interests.90
This insights overlaps with the relational organizing philosophy of
the broad-based community organizing network, the Industrial Areas
Foundation.

Relational
organizing: In one project in South Africa,
Kahane worked closely with Ishmael Mkhabela, the leading South
African figure in the Industrial Areas Foundation network (IAF).
“Mkhabela’s approach to co-creating new social realities
is to build and unite the power of multiple actors so that they can
realize both their own potentials and the larger potential to the
system of which they are a part.” He quotes Ed Chambers,
successor to Saul Alinsky who founded the IAF. Community leaders in
relational organizing, says Chambers, expand power understood as the
capacity to act, “power to,” not “power over.”
“In this fuller sense ‘power’ is a verb meaning ‘to
give and take,’ ‘to be reciprocal,’ ‘to be
influenced as well as to influence.”91

These
insights represent the further development of organizing efforts
rooted in the Great Depression. Saul Alinsky began his work in “Back
of the Yards,” an area of 90,000 impoverished, mostly Eastern
European, Catholic immigrants in the shadow of meat packing
companies. He helped to organize an array of groups into the Back of
the Yards Neighborhood Council (BYNC), first in a campaign to support
a union organizing drive that brought together Catholic priests,
small business, housewives, youth, communist organizers, the American
Legion and labor rank and file in a freewheeling mix. This model of
diverse groups working together in a “people’s
organization” continues to be the heart of the IAF.92
Alinsky’s first book, Reveille for
Radicals, emphasized the need for popular
organizations to be rooted in and to work through local community
life. “The foundation of a People’s Organization is in
the communal life of the local people,” argued Alinsky.
“Therefore the first stage in the building of a People’s
Organization is the understanding of the life of a community, not
only in terms of the individual’s experiences, habits, values
and objectives but also from the point of view of the collective
habits, experiences, customs, controls and values of the whole group,
the community traditions.”Alinsky’s
view was shared by intellectuals and activists who helped shaped the
civil rights movement two decades later.93
But it differed from Dewey’s impulse to take the side of
liberals in communities.

In
the 1960s, Alinsky shifted his emphasis. His second book, Rules
for Radicals, was
“written in desperation” as an attempt to create a
“realistic” primer for radicals.94
The irony was that his “realism” embodied the
estrangement of mass society, consumer society, mass politics, and
the uprooted person. As his biographer Sandy Horwitt has described,
Alinsky had given up on local communities and mediating structures.95
In Rules, Alinsky
proposed a strategy to unite the “have nots” and the
“have some, want mores” in alliance against the “haves,”
a reductive, Manichean politics that made it a handbook of mobilizing
left and right today, including the Tea Party.96

After
his death, organizers and leaders in the Industrial Areas Foundation
went back to organizing, creating new knowledge about public
leadership development, power, public life, and other concepts and
practices.97
Luke Bretherton, one of community organizing’s finest
theorists, contrasts its citizen politics, what he calls “the
politics of a common life,” with claims that today’s
“problems are so overwhelming and so urgent that they are
beyond the scope of widespread deliberation and human judgement…and
instead [require] a ‘neutral,’ top down procedure.”
He observes that alarmism “can involve leaving it all up to the
market to decide or trying to find a one-size-fits-all technocratic
administrative solution.” Bretherton argues that technocracy
displays “the
modernist prejudice:
the need to abandon tradition and eviscerate rather than reform
existing institutions in order to inaugurate the ‘new,’
‘the modern,’ or the ‘progressive’
solution.”98

There
are also limits in broad-based organizing’s politics from the
vantage of culture and social change. It largely accepts Alinsky’s
assumption that the broader culture cannot be changed.
Organizers and leaders make a distinction between “building
organizations” of the poor and powerless, their aim, and
“movements,” which they see only as fleeting and
transitory. The challenge of spreading citizen politics on a scale
sufficient to tame the new technologies is to bring nonviolent
citizen politics and community organizing together with concepts and
practices that can translate them into a movement to effect
widespread changes in the fabric of society. Such a movement needs
cultural politics.

Cultural
politics: Arjun Appadurai stresses the
dynamic, future-oriented qualities of culture, understood as meaning
systems at multiple levels from the local community to the whole
society, as well as its close relationship to agency. He argues that,
“It is in culture that ideas of the future, as much as of those
about the past, are embedded and nurtured.” Combining insights
drawn from cultural theory with deeply appreciative participatory
action research conducted in partnership with shack dwellers,
Appadurai developed the concept of the “capacity to
aspire…conceived as a cultural capacity especially among the
poor [who] find the resources required to contest and alter
conditions of their own poverty.” This challenges conventional
ways of thinking about culture. As Appadurai puts it, “For more
than a century, culture has been viewed as a matter of one or another
kind of pastness—the key words here are habit, custom,
heritage, or tradition.” In contrast, Appadurai stresses
culture’s open, interactive, dynamic, and created qualities
tied to agency. “Empowerment…has to take some local
cultural form to have resonance, mobilize adherents, and capture the
public space of debate.”99
Cultural power, like relational power, highlights power’s
generative, open qualities. Such power is power to
create identities, narratives, practices.

The
theory and practice of intercultural development has kinship with
Appadurai’s cultural politics. It stresses skills and identity
shifts like those experienced by Jane Addams and others in Hull
House, as people from diverse backgrounds learned how to negotiate a
culturally pluralist space.100
“Addams’s own initial sense of superiority [over poor
immigrants] had been grounded partly in her rarified cultural
accomplishments,” writes Louise Knight in her biography of Jane
Addams.“Perhaps
nothing so dramatically marked the significant transformation of her
ideas…as her eventual abandonment of that attitude.”
Addams wrote, “The uncultivated person is bounded by a narrow
outlook, unable to overcome differences in dress and habit, and his
interests are slowly contracting within a circumscribed area.”
In contrast, she saw a cultivated person as “a citizen of the
world because of his growing understanding of all kinds of people and
their varying experiences.” Knight says “she was
describing herself…but also many of the working people of the
Nineteenth Ward.”101

Finally,
cultural politics points to a kind of story-telling of different than
the Manichean model of the Heroes Narrative. Heroes Narrative asserts
that “every great story, from The Iliad
to Star Wars is
told with ‘heroes and villains.’” In fact this
radically reductionist accounts obliterates the complexity of great
narratives by using an abstract binary model which sees no complexity
on “the other side” and purifies one’s own. By way
of contrast, Charles Wilkinson, in his splendid book Blood
Struggle: The Rise of Modern Indian Nations, shows
how many Native American tribes have found inspiration in Charles
Eastman’s Soul of the Indian.
Eastman names oppressive structures. He portrays both Indian life and
European-American communities as full of complexity and
contradiction. He shows commonalities between Indian values and
strands of European American culture like Christianity, with a story
of hope and inclusion.102

How
might public policies foster citizens as agents of their own
political, civic, and cultural development? Deliberation as a strand
of citizen politics holds insights.

Public
deliberation: Public
deliberation, a version of citizen politics which contrasts sharply
with today’s inflamed public discussion, is widely discussed
today in Deweyan circles. The Kettering Foundation, a pioneer in the
field, describes deliberation as not only formal public settings but
everyday conversations in which people are “weighing
possible consequences against what is deeply important to
them…mulling over or sorting out what they hear, perhaps
changing their minds as they learn about someone else’s
experience. Eventually, they may settle on some work that they need
to do.”103Such public talk
cultivates skills of listening and judgment as Derek Barker, a
political theorist at the Kettering Foundation, describes in an essay
contrasting deliberative politics based on “mutual
understanding” with agonistic politics of liberalism or the
search for the solidarity of republicanism. “Mutual
understanding,” Barker says, “strikes a mean between the
unitary collective identity of republican civic virtue and the
generalized individualism of the liberal virtues…We need not
agree with one another but as members of a discursive community, we
make a good faith effort to actually understand [others’]
beliefs and worldviews…We should have the cognitive skills and
habituated experiences to effectively communicate across our
differences.”104

At
moments such public conversation has been joined with concepts of
government as an empowering partner, neither dependency-creating
deliverer of services nor enemy of citizen initiative. For instance,
in Planning
Democracy: Agrarian Intellectuals and the Intended New Deal, Jess
Gilbert recounts how, from 1938 to 1941, a group of agrarian leaders
in the Department of Agriculture, most of whom saw themselves as
“Deweyans,” worked with land grant colleges, cooperative
extension workers, and community leaders to develop an initiative on
rural America. “They create[d] and promote[d] an alternative
understanding of reality, or counter-narrative that challenges the
dominant society,” writes Gilbert. The opposite of detached
experts, “they strongly supported historical traditions local
knowledge, regional cultures, cohesive communities, and other
illegible [James Scott’s term] practices like family farming.
Nor did the agrarian New Dealers place ‘supreme confidence’
in science, much less in industrial farming.” They were, in
short, participatory democrats. “Their vision of democratic
planning stood second to none in its promise of transforming rural
American into a more egalitarian society [with] a wider distribution
of power and resources for common people.”105

The
“intended New Deal” effort described by Gilbert included
farm organizations and unions, churches, youth clubs, professional
and business groups, and government agencies, training about 60,000
discussion leaders, involving over three million people. Parallel
“Philosophy Schools” on large topics related to
challenges of modern society for 35,000 extension agents and others
sought to broaden professionals’ perspectives beyond the
disciplinary boundaries in which they had been socialized. As Jewett
describes the spirit of these efforts, “Many…understood
the term ‘science’ to include the social forces that
shaped the application – and perhaps even the production –
of scientific knowledge.” In such a “dynamic concept of
science,” said Charles Kellogg, a leading soil scientist in
USDA, “the relevancy of fact is as important to truth as fact
itself.” For Kellogg, “so what?” questions need
always to be added to the question “Is it so?”106

Such
New Deal efforts helped to bring older ideas of government of and by
the people into the twentieth century. They conveyed the idea that
democracy is something people make together. USDA initiatives
launched a process of participatory land use planning across the
country that helped to birth soil conservation districts and plans
for preventing soil erosion, fertility depletion and protection of
family farms. In turn these created precedents for a later tradition
of government-as-partner which we built on in the New Citizenship
initiative from 1993 to 1995 with the Clinton Domestic Policy Council
and the civic engagement committee of the Obama 2008 campaign.
Efforts of the New Citizenship are described in Carmen Sirianni and
Lew Friedland’s Civic
Innovation in America.
Peter Levine’s writings on his civic engagement blog and in his
book, We Are the
Ones We’ve Been Waiting For, bring
these traditions to the field of “civic studies.” 107
These create a subterranean current of civic possibility in the age
of the smart machine. They are enriched by public work.

Civic
politics as public work: The labors of
settlers who cleared lands, who built towns and villages, wells,
meeting halls, and roads sustained a “problem solving politics”
as gritty, practical activity. As David Mathews has put it,
“Nineteenth-century self-rule . . . was a sweaty, hands-on,
problem-solving politics.” The way citizen politics could
integrate everyday interests with larger civic purposes is vivid in
the case of schools. “The democracy of self-rule was rooted in
collective decision making and acting—especially acting,”
writes Matthews. “Settlers on the frontier had to be producers,
not just consumers. They had to join forces to build forts, roads,
and libraries…They also established the first public schools.
Their efforts were examples of ‘public work,’ meaning
work done by not just for the public.”108

As
earlier mentioned, public work traditions were embodied in 1930s’
educational practices in cooperative extension. C.B. Smith and M.C.
Wilson, two national extension administrators with USDA, described
such work as “a new leaven at work in rural
America…the cooperative extension work of the state
agricultural colleges and the federal Department of Agriculture,
which is being carried on in cooperation with the counties and rural
people.” They saw it as “stimulating to better endeavor
in farming and home making, bringing rural people together in groups
for social intercourse and study, solving community and neighborhood
problems, fostering better relations and common endeavor between town
and country, bringing recreation, debate, pageantry, drama and art
into the rural community, developing cooperation and enriching the
life and broadening the vision of rural men and women.”
109

My
colleagues and I at the Center for Democracy and Citizenship (now the
Sabo CDC at Augsburg College) have worked with and developed the
concept of public work since the early 1990s, in civic organizing
efforts that translated themes of nonviolent citizen politics,
community organizing, cultural development, and deliberation into
educational settings. These include K-12 schools, the College of St.
Catherine, cooperative extension, the University of Minnesota, the
Civic Agency Initiative undertaken with the American Democracy
Project of the American Association of State Colleges and
Universities, and most recently schools like Augsburg College,
Denison University, Lonestar Community College, and Oklahoma State
University. At the heart of all these efforts is the idea of public
work as not simply deliberating, or
gaining power but as
co-creating the world.

Our
work began with the observation that success in civic change depends
on cultural changes in settings where people work. Specifically, to
effect democratic change requires making work “more public”
in multiple senses – more public in its purposes, more open and
interactive, and more political,
in the sense of
work by a diverse public with often contending interests.
To accomplish, it is necessary to reconceive of institutions as
living, dynamic, and highly complex communities,
with norms, values, leadership, and cultural
identities.

One
key strategy involves sustained work with professionals, as
highlighted by Albert Dzur in his theorizations of professional
work.110The work of professionals
affiliated with the Citizen Professional Center – Bill Doherty,
Tai Mendenhall, Jerica Berge, Shonda Craft, and others – shows
what public work can look like both in professions and institutions.
The Center was
founded by Doherty, a leading family therapist and professor at the
University of Minnesota. Doherty and his colleagues developed the
public work framework in family and health professions, based on the
idea that the energy and talent of families and communities are the
most important resource for addressing complex problems. Citizen
professionals are catalysts and organizers who work with lay
citizens, not on them
or for them.
Over the years the Center created partnerships with a wide variety of
communities and groups, including middle class families worried about
the erosion of family life in a hyper-competitive, individualist
culture; Native Americans in the Twin Cities, who have led a campaign
for abatement of diabetes; African American fathers fighting cultural
messages which degrade fatherhood; and Hennepin County in Minnesota,
reorienting their professionals as “citizen professionals”
who do not have all the answers to complex problems. In every case,
their work has combined on-the-ground development of civic skills and
leadership with high level cultural organizing and politics, finding
ways to frame concerns which resonate widely with Americans concerned
about increasing materialism, consumerism, and individualism. “For
me the key starting point is to ask professionals to think about
their work as a contribution to the capacity for democratic living,”
Doherty told me. After organizing a large, cross partisan movement
called “Citizen Therapists Against Trumpism” in 2016,
aimed not at candidate but at the larger divisive, authoritarian
trends in society, Doherty and his colleagues have renamed their
effort Citizen Therapists for Democracy and have come to focus on
overcoming the deeply ingrained Manichean politics of today. The
first large scale effort began in rural Ohio, in a weekend
interaction between Trump and Clinton supporters to explore
possibilities for common ground.111

The
Citizen Therapists also present a challenge and invitation to all
professionals to think about the public dimensions of their work. As
I write these words, the weekend of April 22-23, scientists are
marching around the world. I see them as defending their public
contributions in ways that might move from protest to what a group of
us, associated with civic studies, calls “civic science,”
or science understood as a set of practices in the service of civic
agency.112
Another priority, directly related to the case study of this lecture,
is the importance of developing “citizen teachers” as
agents of change.

Citizen
politics built on these five elements – nonviolence, relational
organizing, politics of culture, deliberation, and public work --
holds potential to weave schools into the life of communities and
connect schools, at every level, with other civic learning sites.
While citizen politics needs to be embedded in every aspect of
society, it can also help to transform formal politics itself, which
for all its current dysfunction, represents the way societies, at
every level, debate and discuss their future.

A
democratic awakening?

“The
complex and vital challenges we face cannot be addressed effectively
by any one leader or organization or sector, and so we need to build
our capacity for co-creation… Walking Together.” Adam
Kahane, Power and Love 2010113

Signs
abound of a yearning for
human relationships as an antidote to increasing impersonality, as
Jennifer Cline found in her discussions with young adults and college
students. David Mathews, in The Ecology of
Democracy, building on years of the Kettering
Foundation’s research, calls relational environments “the
wetlands” of democracy, drying up with the spread of
technocratic systems. Dewey was getting at this in his social center
address, when he described the “freer play of the forces of the
community which goes on in the daily intercourse of men in an endless
variety of ways.”114

Nancy
L. Rosenblum, in a recent talk at Duke, “Good Neighbors: the
Democracy of Everyday Life in America,” theorizes such wetlands
as neighborhoods, where there is an “unchoreographed dance of
give and take [and] our encounters are direct, personal, and carried
on outside formal institutions.” Rosenblum gives wonderful
examples of being good neighbors drawn from literature and poetry of
what she calls “the democratic ethos of reciprocity among
neighbors.” For instance, in Willa Cather’s My
Antonio, Grandma Burden “disregards her
neighbors’ origin, former social status, and character overall,
and concentrates on what ‘decent folk’ can expect from
one another day to day.” Burden accords her neighbors
considerable latitude, but when one family could not break their
pattern of dependency her view shifted from reciprocity to charity.
“The inversion of moral hierarchy is striking,” says
Rosenblum. “Reciprocity among ‘decent folk’
supersedes love. Neighborliness is demoted
into Christian charity.”115
In Rosenblum’s argument, collective agency is more important
than “help.”

Rosenblum
makes a sharp distinction between everyday democracy and the larger
arena of politics and citizenship, seeing citizenship as having
“something of the character of a public office [which] extends
beyond formal political arenas to public accommodations and,
increasingly, the universe of organized groups and associations.”
She argues that “neighbor is not an office,” nor is
neighborly action “training in or derivative of civic virtue.”
Citizenship theory in her view “prescribes the replication of
political principles and structures of authority…to an
ever-widening array of public institutions, to civil society, and the
family.” The “democracy of everyday life,” by
contrast, “is democracy’s personal, individual, human
substrate. Its earthy material.”116

Here,
theoretical innovations emerging from years of democratic practices
which build agency, individual and collective, and appear in the five
elements of citizen politics which I discussed, shift the terms of
debate beyond the liberal view of citizenship as legal status, or the
communitarian or republican one which Rosenblum is challenging,
citizenship as a normative claim in communities. Our new field of
civic studies, drawing on grounded theoretical traditions of agency,
advances the fluid, agentic, and open concept of citizen as
co-creator. Concepts such as “public love” and
“relational power” add resources. Public love does not
rest on the classical distinction between private and public life
understood as the realm of civic virtue. Rather it is an action idea
aimed at enhancing relational power. In the Industrial Areas
Foundation, public is the space of diverse interests, views, and
background where we bring our interests and passions, rather than
putting them aside in the name of civic virtue. The principles of
agentic action in a public world are different than private life. In
the former, one best employs concepts such as accountability,
respect, recognition, and relational power. Private life is the
terrain of intimacy and personal love. Again and again in Public
Achievement, in societies as diverse as Poland, Zimbabwe, the
Palestinian territories, and the United States, we have seen how
public life understood in these terms and citizenship not as an
“office” but as co-creation, provides extraordinarily
powerful resources for relational action.

Themes
of communal freedom and civic agency rarely make it into the public
forums of elections, but there are exceptions. Linda Honold was
inspired to see an alternative to mobilizing and Manichean politics
in the Obama 2008 campaign and the campaign in 2012 Minnesotans
United for All Families, which successfully opposed a constitutional
ban on same sex marriage.117
Both Obama 2008 and MN United incorporated “organizing”
dimensions, consciously breaking with Manichean-style mobilizing.
They demonstrated that organizing elements can be integrated into
highly goal-directed and large scale efforts like elections.
Organizing has a focus on building public leadership of participants.
It allows space for self-organizing activity, even in political
campaigns. It uses cultural methods such as story-telling (“public
narrative”). It builds public relationships across difference.
Finally, of crucial importance, campaigns built on relational civic
politics convey some version of public love, resting on the premise
that those on “the other side” are not the enemy. Rather,
they are complex and full of possibilities. Both campaigns were
extremely successful by conventional measures, going from enormous
deficits in polls to large victories. Such campaign methods,
using relational citizen politics, require
campaign messages that
are consonant, conveying hope, inclusion, and agency. Obama 2008
conveyed “yes we can.” MN United developed a
“pro-marriage” message after they asked skeptics about
gay marriage the reasons for their skepticism. This was the first
time skeptics had been asked their reasons, after 30 straight
campaigns based on mobilizing and Manichean approaches had been
defeated. MN United conversations showed that worry about marriages
was a key concern.

After
the dismal election of 2016 and before the inauguration of Donald
Trump as president, suggestions of the need for citizen politics
appeared fleetingly in the national discussion. On January 11,
President Obama gave a farewell address at Chicago’s McCormick
Place. Speaking to young Americans, he struck an inspirational tone.
“I’ve seen you in every corner of the country,” he
said. “You believe in a fair, just, and inclusive America…and
you are willing to carry the hard work of democracy forward.”
He proposed that any threats to democracy could be countered by “the
most important office,” being a citizen.118

Obama
conveyed progressive themes, arguing that “race relations are
better than they were, but we’re not where we need to be.”
He called for appreciation for science and reason. Two days later
Governor John Kasich spoke in Ohio, striking Republican themes. He
called for a balanced budget and tax cuts. He directed his remarks to
business leaders, church groups, synagogues and civic organizations.
But beneath differences were parallel messages. “The best
solutions in our country come not from the top down, but from a
combination of the bottom up with the top responding,” Kasich
argued. “We need to have the community engaged. Stick your nose
in somebody else’s business.”119
I agree with Kasich, and also with Obama when he said, on the 50th
anniversary of the March on Washington in 2013, that “change
comes to Washington, not from Washington.”120
To transform education, to promote schools as civic centers, and to
spread citizen politics more generally it is important for electoral
campaigns to emerge from the civic side, not simply from politicians.

A
messy, complex but important example from the civic side appeared in
Georgia in 2016 after the popular Republican governor Nathan Deal put
on the ballot a constitutional amendment to allow the governor to
take charge of “chronically failing” schools and the tax
revenue which supports them. Under his plan, called the Opportunity
School District, failed schools would either be run directly by a new
state agency or be converted to charter schools under management
contracts, also open to profit making businesses. Deal claimed that
passage would “empower parents” and end “an
inexcusable crisis” that left 67,000 kids trapped in cycles of
poverty and crime. With support from large corporations and leaders
in national charter school groups, Deal’s proposed amendment
was expected to pass easily, following a charter school initiative in
Georgia in 2012 which Deal had championed.

The
Georgia Teachers Association began with a defensive tone, but as the
campaign progressed and citizen organizers and local civic leaders
became involved, the framework stressed a more positive theme of
local power. The opposition named their group the Committee to Keep
Georgia Schools Local. They described the amendment as a power grab
and pointed out that the amendment proposed a false solution, with no
constructive ideas for changing troubled schools like better teaching
methods, teacher training, or more community tutoring. The local
school coalition attracted a highly diverse group of supporters,
including not only the union but also black clergy and inner city
leaders, the Georgia Parent Teacher Association, rural school boards
– more than 40 passed resolutions opposing it – and key
Republican strongholds. The amendment was defeated with over 60%
voting in opposition.

Gerald
Taylor, a veteran community organizer, former director of the
Industrial Areas Foundation’s Southeastern region, and a
pioneer in IAF’s relational organizing approach, served as a
consultant to the local school coalition. He observes that the
campaign shows how far there is to go. After the election conflicts
broke out between some parent teachers groups and others. But the
campaign also showed the potential of a highly diverse coalition to
bridge what many have seen as intractable racial and urban-rural
divides, using the theme of local power in education. It demonstrated
that “good politics” can be “smart politics.”
In Taylor’s view, the key to the coalition success was the
shift from a typical mobilizing approach to an approach that
encouraged local creativity (for instance there was a fight about
whether to allow yard signs, first opposed by the union but which
local communities won), engagement with local cultures and local
leadership. The campaign also emphasized contextualizing technology,
metrics and communication with what Taylor calls “social
knowledge,” stressing a larger vision of schools. “We
argued that schools are much more than buildings or even places to
teach kids,” he said. “They are rallying centers in rural
communities and inner cities. They are economic engines. They are
community assets where people have ownership.”121

It
is positive to have national figures like Obama and Kasich emphasize
citizens’ initiative. It is even more promising to see
coalitions like the Committee to Keep Georgia Schools Local raise the
power of local communities to shape their educational fate.

17
Lee Benson, Ira Harvaky, and John Puckett, Dewey’s Dream:
Universities and Democracies in the Age of Education Reform
(Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2007), p. 42.

18
Roudy Hildreth observed Dewey’s shift in orientation from
local experiment to national and international initiatives after he
went to Columbia University, phone conversation April 12, 2017;
Harkavy argues that Dewey’s loss of regular connection with
Jane Addams and the inspiring example of Hull House, contributed
significantly to his failure to build on the School as Social Centre
and work to develop a school-as-civic center movement.

19
Winthrop in Robert Bellah, The Broken Covenant: American Civil
Religion in a Time of Trial (New York: Seabury, 1975), p. 15.

25
Natalie Gil, “Loneliness: A Silent Plague That Is Hurting
Young People the Most,” Guardian, July 20, 2014. The
Mental Health Foundation “found
loneliness to be a greater concern among young people than the
elderly. The 18 to 34-year-olds surveyed were more likely to feel
lonely often, to worry about feeling alone and to feel depressed
because of loneliness than the over-55s.”

35
Andrew Jewett, Science, Democracy, and the American University:
From the Civil War to the Cold War (Cambridge: Harvard
University Press, 2010); Bevier quoted in Ted Alter, Scott Peters,
and Tim Shaffer, Making Democracy Work as It Should: Stories and
Lessons from Cooperative Extension Professionals (Dayton:
Kettering Foundation, forthcoming 2017).

36
According to Taylor, “The same principles” of scientific
management “can be applied with equal force to all social
activities: to the management of our homes; the management of our
farms; the management of the business of our tradesmen, large and
small; of our churches, our philanthropic institutions our
universities, and our government departments.” Frederick
Winslow Taylor, Principles of Scientific Management (New
York: Harper & Brothers, 1947), p. 8.

40
This process of relocation to the state is described in Harry C.
Boyte, “A Different Kind of Politics: John Dewey and the
Meaning of Citizenship in the 21st Century,”
University of Michigan Dewey Lecture, Ann Arbor, November 1, 2002.

58
Alan Ryan, John Dewey and the High Tide of American Liberalism
(New York: W.W. Norton, 1995), pp. 105-106.

59
Dewey, Human Nature and Conduct: An Introduction to Social
Psychology, Middle Works 14:31-32. 286.

60
Deborah Meier, “So What Does It Take to
Build a School for Democracy?” Phi
Delta Kappan 2003, p. 16 and
personal interview, Boston, November 1, 2001.

61
Deborah Meier, “Who Is Making the Decisions,” Education
Week, February 28 2007.

62
On the disastrous effects of the efforts to engineer Newark’s
public schools from the outside organized by then mayor Cory Booker,
Governor Chris Christie, and Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, see
“Assessing the $100 Million Upheaval of Newark’s Public
Schools,” an interview with journalist Dale Russakoff,
National Public Radio, September 21, 2015.

65
Eric Truan, email communications on February 28, March 1, April 7th,
used with permission.

66
Description of Coalition from Boyte interview with Ira Harkavy,
April 14, St. Paul to Philadelphia and from Coalition for Community
Schools materials drawn from the web site at
http://www.communityschools.org/
accessed April 15, 2017. Harkavy quote from the interview.

67
Harkavy and six co-authors, Lee Benson, John Puckett, Matthew
Hartley, Rita Hodges, Francis Johnston, and Joann Weeks, describe
the history of the Coalition, its growth, and signs of broader
ferment around the Deweyan concept of schools as civic centers in
their forthcoming book, Knowledge for Social Change: Bacon,
Dewey,and the Revolutionary Transformation of Research Universities
in the 21st Century (Philadelphia:
Temple University Press, forthcoming 2017),
https://www.temple.edu/tempress/titles/2464_reg.html

68
John Dewey, “Democracy in the Schools” (1937), in
Intelligence in the Modern World: John
Dewey’s Philosophy ed. Joseph Ratner(New York: Random House, 1939), 717.

77
Dewey, School, p. 2 online text. For “citizen politics”
different than ideology, see Boyte, “A Different Kind of
Politics”; Luke Bretherton, Resurrecting Democracy: Faith,
Citizenship, and the Politics of a Common Life (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2015); Bernard Crick, In Defense of
Politics (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1962). Roudy Hildreth,
the preeminent theorist on Dewey’s theory of power, argues
that Dewey did have at least a general sense of “politics”
in associational life in society, though Hildreth agrees that Dewey
lacked a detailed sense of “organizing.” Boyte phone
conversation with Hildreth April 13, 2017.

78
For a detailed discussion of Dewey and the Polish community, see
Westbrook, Dewey and Democracy , pp. 212-23; for discussion
of Dewey’s war with Catholics, Ryan, Dewey and High Tide,
pp. 336-43; quote from 336.

79
Peter Berger and Richard John Neuhaus, To Empower People: The
Role of Mediating Structures in Public Policy (Washington, D.C:
American Enterprise Institute, 1977), p. 6.

80Michael
Joyce, from Project Public Life, the newsletter of the Center
for Democracy and Citizenship, December, 1992.

81
Paul Baumann, “The Pope v the Culture of Death,” New
York Times October 8, 1995.

82Catholic
social thought spotlights the efficiency problem while confounding
left-right divides. Pope Francis in his 2015 encyclical, Laudato
Si’:
On Care for Our Common Home,describes the epistemological shift that
prioritizes rational, informational approaches for dealing with
human problems over relational and cultural approaches

83
Giovanni Sartori, in his history of the word politics, “What
is Politics,” Political Theory , Vol. 1, No. 1 (1973),
pp. 1-36, details the horizontal relationships of equal citizens at
the heart of the language of politics and associated ideas. Not
until the 19th century did “politics” acquire
“verticality,” or relations to the state. Bernard
Crick, In Defense of Politics (London and New York:
Continuum, 1962), sought to retrieve older meanings. Crick, drawing
on Aristotle, stresses the irreducible plurality of politics
as negotiation of diverse and particular interests.

87
Gene Sharp, The Politics of Nonviolent Action: Part One, Power
and Struggle (Boston: Porter Sargent Publishers, 1973); for
discussions see April Carter, “The Literature on Civil
Resistance,” in Adam Roberts and Timothy Garton Ash, Civil
Resistance & Power Politics: The Experience of Non-violent
Action from Gandhi to the Present (New York: Oxford University
Press, 2009), pp. 25-42; Mark Engler and Paul Engler, This Is an
Uprising: Now Nonviolent Revolt Is Shaping the Twenty-first Century
(New York: Nation books, 2016).

89
I greatly appreciate my Augsburg colleague Joachin Munoz’s
introducing me to the nonviolent framework of “power and love”
developed Kahane, as well as the discussions with colleagues in the
Augsburg Civic Studies initiative over the 2016-17 school year about
these themes.

90
Adam Kahane, Power and Love: A Theory and Practice of Social
Change (San Francisco: Berrett-Kohler Publishers, 2010).

97
For a summary of these see Harry C. Boyte, CommonWealth: A Return
to Citizen Politics (New York: Free Press, 1989). IAF has a rich
intellectual life and practice across its networks. For instance,
Jason Lowry, a young organizer with COPS in San Antonio – the
pioneer in many modern organizing practices – told me he is
using the idea of “public friendship,” different than
personal friendship, akin to “public love,” with a great
deal of success. He draws from Hannah Arendt, Men in Dark Times
(New York: Stellar Books, 1968).

102
Heroes’ Narrative quoted from site http://heroesnarrative.org/
; for an alternative see Charles Wilkinson, Blood Struggle: The
Rise of Modern Indian Nations (New York: W.W. Norton, 2005), and
Charles Alexander Eastman, The Soul of the Indian (Lincoln:
University of Nebraska Press, 1911, 1980).

106
Andrew Jewett, “The Social Sciences, Philosophy, and the
Cultural Turn in the 1930s USDA,” Journal of the History of
the Behavioral Sciences Vol. 49, No. 4 (2013), p. 412.

107
Carmen Sirianni and Lew Friedland, Civic Innovation in America
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001); Peter Levine
http://peterlevine.ws/ and We
Are the Ones We’ve Been Waiting For (New York and London:
Oxford University Press, 2014).

112
A group of us initially brought together by Dave Thelen and
including John Spencer at the University of Iowa, Scott Peters at
Cornell, Nick Jordan, Phil Zelazo and Stephanie Carlson at the
University of Minnesota, and Sherry Abbott at Syracuse, developed
the concept of civic science, akin to the “scientific
democrats” Jewett describes, as an understanding of science in
service of human agency individual and collective. Civic science
also overlaps with strands of complexity science.